The Niagara News is the community newspaper of Niagara College located in Welland and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. It is created and produced by the students of the Niagara College Journalism program.

Voices from across the border: it’s Trump; now what?

Many Americans were caught off guard by the unexpected win by president-elect Donald Trump.

Niagara News reached out to a handful of American contacts for their election night reactions.

Arnett Caviel — Republican Miami, Florida Law student

What is your initial reaction to these results? “This was a surprise, but I will tell you as soon as I saw states like North Carolina and Florida being trouble for Hillary Clinton – they were saying that Donald Trump was up in certain areas of those states – that I knew that it was going to be trouble for her. I remember watching during the Romney election and those states along the eastern seaboard were trouble for Romney and I knew that was going to be a rough night for Romney, so the exact opposite happened this time. Virginia wasn’t called automatically, and that’s Hillary’s vice-president’s home state, so as soon as I saw that I knew that she was going to be in trouble.”

How would you describe the election as a whole? “As a history and political science major, I’ve never seen anything like this. I’d say this is probably one of the dirtiest elections I’ve seen, studied or looked at. It was one where the typical projections couldn’t predict (the winner). It was no holds barred, it was all thrown out. The typical way of looking at elections was all thrown out.”

What was the most important issue for you? “The most important issue was not her emails, but the corruption coming from her direction. She’s been a corrupt candidate, kind of a corrupt person, ever since she left Arkansas. That and the Supreme Court nominee. Just the whole Bernie Sanders thing; you saw in the emails that they were being dishonest.”

Do you think this election will bring change? “Well I hope that he might be able to establish a brain trust. (President) Franklin D. Roosevelt had a group called the “Brain Trust”. Trump will bring together all these Republican big shots, maybe Ben Carson to be head of something, and he will be able to have a group of people and fix everything. Maybe not fix everything, but change a whole bunch of things. Shake some things up, because I think that’s what the American people have been voting for. Somebody to shake things up because they’re tired of the same old kind of corrupt politician.”

What was more important; the race for president or the down-ballot elections? “Definitely the presidential election. Mainly the presidential election, but the senate races were definitely important. The senate races were definitely more important than the house races because we were a little bit more expected to hold those because it’s a bit more difficult for Democrats to take those. Also, another big issue was gun control. I didn’t want anything from Hillary; that was another big issue for me.”

Do you have any other takeaways from tonight? “What they’ve been saying is kind of interesting: if the Republican party doesn’t change, then we’re going to be stuck losing these presidential elections for a while. They were saying that Trump made a big change away from the conservative side to a more populist position. I’m not sure if I quite agree with that, but I feel like we should start moving to the middle and we can be more competitive.”

Brendan Thompson Raleigh, North Carolina Biotech sales representative

What is your initial reaction to these results? “Well, in my opinion, I wasn’t really confident in either candidate. I think either way it was going to swing, I was just going to work with the best of what we get put in front of us. I guess with Trump as the winner, there are some things that I can agree with him, and some things that I don’t. I think at this point as one American citizen, you can just do your duty to the country. And as a country, we just have to work with what we got.”

Was the result in North Carolina a surprise? “No, we’re generally a Republican state. I was surprised to see how close it was, and there have been some local stories that have come out about some polling stations in Durham that stayed open and some other things that had come up in the local elections that I particularly followed. For the overall election, I’m not too surprised about North Carolina going Republican.”

What was the most important issue for you? “For me, I think the biggest issue is their economic standpoints. As a young, single, middle-class American, I don’t really fall under a lot of these benefits we’ve seen over the last few years. From an economic standpoint, having my tax dollars going to things that I really typically don’t utilize was a big concern for me.”

Was that issue a focus of the election? “Absolutely not. No way. Like I said, I wasn’t a true supporter of either person. I couldn’t 100 per cent commit to either candidate, and when I did sit down and watch these debates about what their plans were, these debates brought up certain questions, and you never got a straight answer, you had to do extra research to look into what their plans were and so on and so forth. Some people talk about it, but a lot of the time there were so many other things that surpassed the issues that I was concerned about, because of things on social media — all these different scandals — and negative campaigning against each other just surpassed everything that’s really what needs to be taken care of.”

Do you think this election will bring change? “I don’t think everything that Donald has said is going to come to fruition. There’s going to be a lot of checks and balances that come out of this. I have a feeling there will be certain things that are passed, but a lot of the extreme comments that came out of this — I don’t see it happening. Some of these larger issues that come to mind, I think there’s going to be a lot of checks, a lot of review prior to anything being executed.”

What was more important; the race for president or the down-ballot elections? “Some of the smaller, more local stuff was more important, like senate races, local governors as well as the house races because that’s really what makes or breaks how certain laws will be passed. That’s going to be more of an influential thing and people are too focused on the two main candidates. These two have been such large figures over the past year. They’ve been in the media for so long that people are just focused on this one person when there is so much more to go into how the country works.”

Do you have any other takeaways from tonight? “There’s a big schism between the two parties and there’s a lot of people torn in the middle. You’ve got to pick one side or the other and if you vote for a third party, it’s almost like throwing your vote away. I think over time the system is going to change and you’re going to see new people come in with different views and not be so extreme.”

Ally Gilmartin — independent Atlanta, Georgia Account executive

What are your thoughts on the results? “I don’t even know, to be honest, if I know how to react to this just yet. Since I got home from work, for about six hours now, I’ve been watching CNN while simultaneously refreshing Google’s electoral map. I’m just in disbelief.”

How would you describe the election as a whole? “Where do we even begin? I didn’t take his candidacy seriously, I don’t think anyone did, until a week ago. The whole last year has just been utter disbelief every step of the way, but still heading towards a trajectory where it was almost but no one being able to accept that it was going to happen across the country.”

What was the most important issue for you? “I don’t know if I can really identify one particular issue. It was more a compound of things that I knew I couldn’t justify supporting.”

Were those issues a focus? “I think they’re in line with politicians generally in the sense that they say a whole lot of nothing. They never really gave details for their plans, so in that sense it was par for the course. But did they talk about what I needed to know? No. I guess I really didn’t engage with any of it because I couldn’t logically accept that it was really happening.”

Do you think this election will bring change? “I don’t see how anything could possibly be the status quo with Donald Trump as President of the United States. So on the one hand I’m kind of hopefully; for better or for worse, things are going to change. I mean, that’s what we’ve been asking for, so we’re just getting what we asked for.”

What was more important; the race for president or the down-ballot elections? “I think they’re equally as important because Congress, and especially right now the Supreme Court — justices are going to need to be appointed in the next few years — have massive impacts and a president is only as powerful as Congress lets him be.”

Greg Lee — independent Seattle, Washington Software engineer

What is your initial reaction to these results? “I think the American people are not the brightest in the world. I think there are a lot of educated people who did not vote based on certain things about Clinton. I don’t know how much people believe about the emails and that kind of thing, but my general perception is that America isn’t super bright.”

What did you think of the election as a whole? “It was more like a reality show than anything else. It was a lot of shock factor kind of stuff. It was amazing the kind of stuff Trump was able to get away with saying. It was like a reality TV show with nothing really much about policy, at least on one side.”

What was the most important issue for you? “I was a bit decided already so I haven’t been following it honestly. As a decided voter a lot of it didn’t matter to me. I also live in Washington, so it’s a blue state; never ever red.”

Do you think this election will bring change? “I think it won’t be as big as people are expecting. There will be things that change, like he might be doing something stupid like stop clean power. A bunch of the executive orders Obama has done, Trump can basically negate them on his first day in office. A lot of those kind of things may change because he feels like it. Other than that, I think, day to day, you can’t completely tank an entire country with one person, even at the top, hopefully, at least one based on capitalism. At least I hope.”

What was more important; the race for president or the down-ballot elections? “I think the presidential race was probably the most important. The senate races were a close second because having a party own the house, the senate and the presidency is basically a rubber stamp to do a lot of things. It’s very dangerous, especially with what the Republicans have been trying to push recently. I mean, I even have Republican friends who are kind of scared of that too, so we’ll see how that goes. Must be a good time to be in Canada.”